Smart kitchen appliances give home cooks an edge in a number of ways. First, when you connect a kitchen gadget to your smartphone, you can more easily schedule when something should start cooking and monitor its progress remotely. For example, if you have a smart coffee maker, you can set it to start brewing a cup when you say "Alexa, good morning." Another advantage is that many smart kitchen gadgets, like the Anova sous vide, have recipes built into its app, which takes the guesswork out of knowing how long you need to cook a steak to make sure it's perfectly medium rare.
From Instant Pots to coffee makers to home beer-brewing machines, here are our favorite smart kitchen gadgets.
Instant Pot has almost single-handedly popularized the pressure cooker market, and with good reason. Its programmable device can not only make 5-minute risotto, but can also be used to cook eggs, cakes, yogurt, and more in the fraction of the time it takes traditionally. After testing all of the company's models, the best Instant Pot is the Instant Pot Duo. It was the best at making eggs, chicken, rice, pork, and more, and it's reasonably priced. too. This model is available in 3-, 6- and 8-quart sizes.
The Braun Brew Sense Drip Coffee Maker KF6050 is the best coffee maker for more than one reason. For starters, it looks classy and will fit neatly on your countertop. Not only does it make a good cup of coffee, but has features such as a permanent filter and a charcoal water filter. It makes up to 12 cups at a time, and you can also adjust the temperature of the warming plate, to keep your coffee hotter longer.
While small, the Bambino is the best espresso machine because it consistently produces excellent cups of espresso. It has a 1,560-watt thermacoil, so it's ready to go within seconds with a press of a button, and can make double or single shots from a large, removable 2-liter reservoir that keeps the coffee coming. An autofrothing and temp-sensing steam wand is capable of whipping up milk for lattes, too.
"Sous vide" is a process in which you vacuum-seal something — say, a steak — in a plastic bag, then immerse it in a hot water bath for a long time. This low-and-slow cooking method results in amazingly tender and juicy meat. Anova's Nano Precision Cooker takes the guesswork out by connecting to your smartphone via an app, and alerting you when your food is ready.
Plus, the app has recipes and tips from Serious Eats, one of the better cooking sites online. The Bluetooth-only Nano, Anova's newest model, is smaller than the original, yet has better on-device controls, and heats water and cooks your food just as fast.
How do you know if the turkey is done? You could keep opening the oven and sticking a thermometer in the bird, but what if you could simply sit back and watch the football game and get an alert on your smartphone when the bird is cooked? That's where the iGrill2 comes in handy.
The Master Kit comes with three meat probes as well as an ambient temperature probe, which makes it great not just for grilling, but smoking meat as well, too. The iGrill2 works over Bluetooth (it has a 150-foot range), and its app has recommended temperatures for all sorts of meats and doneness levels (rare, medium rare, etc.), and can send you alerts when what you're cooking hits a preset temperature.
Brewing your own beer can be a messy and inexact process. The PicoBrew looks to make doing so as easy as pressing a button. All that you need to do with this machine is insert packets of hops, yeast and grain, and the machine (mostly) does the rest. A few weeks later, and you've got 5 liters of beer.
PicoBrew also partnered with more than 50 breweries, so you can replicate that awesome IPA that you can't find in any store. Plus, a new PicoStill attachment lets you distill spirits, too.
A camera built inside the June smart oven not only lets you watch from your smartphone as your food cooks, but this oven has AI, which uses the camera to identify what you put in, and immediately suggests the optimal cooking time and temperature. It's a little pricey so this large device isn't for everyone, but it'll give you a taste of the future.
